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Comment by lopis | Hacker News Reader

That's the reason why many youtubers on patreon switch to a monthly subscription rather than charging per video. It makes it clearer that we are supporting the creator's livelihood, not buying a token that they produced. Would anyone pay for a Taylor Swift subscription if that meant she could relax and produce music as she sees fit? Higher subscription tiers could include merchandising and concert tickets.

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> Would anyone pay for a Taylor Swift subscription if that meant she could relax and produce music as she sees fit?

I have a (completely speculative) theory that the "support the artist to keep creating the work they're giving away for free" model has a ceiling when artists become visibly a lot richer than their fans.

After all, what kind of sucker would charitably donate to a multimillionaire's private jet running costs?

That sounds like a feature, not a bug.

Even if this is true, the ceiling is very high. Look at the current top earners on Patreon, with a known per month figure:

https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators

* Chapo Trap House, 3 hosts - 170k/month

* The Tim Dillon Show, 1 host - 121k/month

* AdeptusSteve (I couldn't figure out how many people, possibly 1 guy making some sort of porn game?) - 103k/month

* Flagrant 2, 2 hosts - 98k/month

* Tiny Meat Gang, 2 hosts - 82k/month

* Cum Town, 3 hosts - 81k/month

Note that the dollar amounts of most of the people on that list aren't visible and I cut them off at 80k/month.

People are willingly chipping in to help creators making 1M/year, not including sponsorships, live shows, etc.

And there are some multimillionaires that could likely make it work. If the Spotify deal hadn't happened, Joe Rogan almost certainly could have.

Unrelated comment about the list: of the Patreon categories, podcasters are predictably over-represented. But I am surprised by the number of "adult games" on the list. I didn't realize how popular these were.

How much of that is really charitable? Patreon allows creators to lock access to some content behind a set monthly amount, which makes the transaction more like a regular subscription than a donation. How many of those top earners use that feature?

It doesn't have to be pure charity. I was a subscriber to Deadmau5's livestreams back when he was doing that. Monthly subscription and you had access to a private stream that was almost always live when he was producing in the studio. That particular example is boring if you're not into music production, but there are certainly things an artist can do to make a subscription worthwhile. Will it make a superstar artist more money than the usual means? Probably not. But it also doesn't have to include zero rewards.

That does not seem to be the case in Twitch, for example. The largest creators just amass larger and larger numbers of subscribers ($5/month) even though it is public knowledge that these people are making >$1M/month in some cases.

Suckers or not, but people do donate to visibly rich people, e.g. Trump.

Spread the love around: Nancy Pelosi has a net worth of about $120M, and even Joe Biden is worth $9M. Donating to a national political campaign is usually a donation to a rich person.

Why are you conflating personal wealth with political campaigns?

I think that would be great. If the artists are being paid enough to support them* and their craft, and they're being paid enough to help motivate others to become artists, then they shouldn't get any more money. That money would be better spent elsewhere.

* "support them" would also include leaving them with enough money to retire on after their career, if they live in a country where retirement savings are important to have, or otherwise are a strong motivating factor for those who are considering this as a career.

That sounds pretty rational, however it does not mesh with reality of most popular streamers getting literally showered with money. There is definitely some rational subset of population that will stop donating once it's clear the artist has made it. My theory is that when you give money to someone it's a commitment that you like them. And once you like them, you are more likely to contribute more money. I'd wager for top artist this effect will dominate the rational people curbing donations effect.

> After all, what kind of sucker would charitably donate to a multimillionaire's private jet running costs?

Millions of people currently support many televangelists in precisely this way, so this isn't rhetorical.

Plenty of people send money to televangelists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg

I think with an estimated net worth of $360,000,000 Taylor Swift could just relax and produce music as she sees fit, without any need for subscriptions.

> That's the reason why many youtubers on patreon switch to a monthly subscription rather than charging per video.

Well, that or it’s just more user friendly. It’s hard to plan my finances if I don’t know how much I’ll be paying (since I don’t know, and have no control over, how many creations someone will make next month).

Bandcamp offers a subscription service [0] for just this purpose. I've thought about it for one or two, and $5/mo or whatever doesn't sound much, but it pretty quickly adds up across music, newsletters, patreons, etc... i need an aggregator for paying all of my content aggregators.

[0] https://bandcamp.com/subscriptions

Neil Young has done pretty much exactly that.

https://neilyoungarchives.com/

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